China may be communist, but for decades capitalists have run roughshod over labor. Now Chinese workers are standing up for their rights—and that could change the global economy

When Mao Zedong’s communists took power in China in 1949, their victory was supposed to herald a Marxist proletariat revolution that would create a workers’ paradise. Or at least that’s what the toiling masses were told. Reality proved somewhat different. Workers became cogs in Mao’s soulless industrial machine, controlled by the state and trapped in grinding poverty. …